One of the most anticipated game titles – Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – has just hit the market. X-bit labs decided to take a closer look at this game in order to help you pick up the right graphics card for the ultimate gaming experience.

Performance

Premium/High-End Category

The picture is quite clear in the Premium segment of the graphics cards chart. Nothing can come close to AMD/ATI flagship solutions. The performance level of multi-GPU technology by Radeon HD 5970 is unreachable even for its aging counterpart from Nvidia. Through reviewed resolutions Radeon HD 5970 maintains a steady 30% lead over GeForce GTX 295 graphics card. Single chip duel also turns in favor of a much more powerful and newer AMD product. GeForce GTX 285 is trying hard to keep up with Radeon HD 5870 but loses every battle by almost 18%.

GeForce lineup is represented by a retiring architecture and does a good job in keeping up with AMD's finest. On the other hand, this fact suggests that an outdated game engine does not know how to use Radeon architecture capabilities to their fullest extend.

It must be said that both dual and single GPU products barely deliver comfortable level of performance. If you are trying to be on top of your game, you will have to disable a setting or two. Taking a shot with the sniper rifle at anything below 60fps is really difficult. Without disabling FSAA or HBAO quality settings the lucky owners of 30" displays can forget about native 2560x1600 resolution gaming.

Having said that, the obvious choice from the Premium/High-End sector of the market would be AMD/ATI based graphics cards. Both Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 5870 deliver comfortable framerates as long as you keep your screen resolution in check and outperform Nvidia solutions in every case reviewed. It turns out that a few years old Battlefield: Bad Company 2 graphics engine is quite a hard nut to crack even for the monster card from AMD. Now let’s see how Performance-Mainstream solutions take the beating.